Imagine if building a flashlight was as easy as stacking blocks, or that you could build a robot with a shoebox, nine-volt battery, and a pile of components small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Enter LittleBits, a modular, à la carte electronics prototyping platform for users of all skill levels

The Westport Library’s ongoing efforts to support its Maker Space, including Maker in Residence programs and the recent acquisition of two programmable robots, have helped establish a virtuous cycle in which residents have begun working on their own projects and helping one another independently.

Rebecca Forth doesn’t want kids to simply play Minecraft, she wants them to design their own worlds in the virtual building game. They can do just that and learn the necessary coding skills in a program set to launch at the Healdsburg branch of the Sonoma County (CA) Library in March 2014.

The best applications for teaching basic programming skills—no geek cred required to use them successfully in your classroom or library. Other apps enable kids to build 3-D models, which they can print, too.

In a rebuttal to Roy Tennant’s recent blog post, Paul Oh of the National Writing Project maintains “that knowing HTML—even just knowing how to find the HTML on a webpage or knowing just a few of the tags that comprise the language—makes us increasingly Web literate and gives us critical knowledge in relation to the most important writing production engine of our lifetime, the Internet.”

For newcomers, computer source code can look quite alien. Librarians might be reminded of the first time they saw a MARC record—a mishmash of recognizable words and bits of information embedded in funky punctuation. But it doesn’t have to be that way–learning code can help librarians customize and improve the usability of web-based resources and vendor interfaces and improve communication with a library’s IT staff and software vendors.